What is NAP?
Name, address, and phone number (or NAP for short) is the term used for ensuring the contact details for your business are consistent across the internet. It is a critical aspect of local SEO and sends positive signals to search engines that all online mentions of your brand and contact details are accurate.
Essentially, best practice for NAP is to choose a key set of contact details to display on your website and ensure everything else across the internet reflects those.
How can NAP help local rankings?
Moz conducted research in 2018, which determined NAP to be a ranking factor in local SEO in terms of citation and on-page signals. Having consistent and accurate contact details across the internet can therefore have a positive impact on how a site performs in local search results, which includes map packs and Google My Business profiles.
Google also uses this information to determine if a business is active and trustworthy. If these contact details vary between different websites, it could be an indicator that things are out of date, which could lead to other websites being ranked instead.
Is it beneficial to user?
Beyond the benefits on local SEO, having a consistent NAP presence across the internet also means users will be able to find the right contact details regardless of where they are found.
Scam activity is more and more prevalent across the internet, with consumer trust taking a hard hit, particularly with contact details like phone number and email addresses. Ensuring that searchers trying to contact you are using a live channel can be vital to maintaining faith in your business.
How to improve your NAP
The best place to start with your NAP is your own website. Take a look at your brand name, address, phone number, and email address and ensure they are accurate and valid. Naturally, there will be some variation of phone numbers and email address, and perhaps even physical addresses if multiple locations are covered. However, the key here is making sure each specific location is consistent across your site.
Once you are happy with the details covered on your own site, we suggest taking a look elsewhere to identify any issues with how your business is mentioned and where improvements can be made. Here is a list of some websites you should consider:
- Google My Business
- Bing Places
Finding mentions of your business
There are numerous free and paid tools out there which can help you find mentions of your business online, such as SEMrush. However, the easiest way to find your website (albeit the most manual way) is to turn to Google.
You will want to search for every mention of your brand name, address and phone number and identify any websites which mention them. From here, create a list of any websites that include inaccurate contact details and determine how you can fix them.
It is also worth checking for any previous addresses or phone numbers which have been used in the past. This presents a good opportunity for making contact with websites, as they will likely want to be using accurate information.
If you have any questions about your NAP and would like to speak to one of our SEO specialists, feel free to contact us here